Magnus Carlsen Wins the 2012 London Chess Classic

Magnus Carlsen has won the 2012 London Chess Classic after an exceptional tournament that will live long in the memory.

His +5 performance in earning a third Classic title was enough to break the 13-year old Elo rating record of Garry Kasparov.

In the last round Magnus Carlsen was unable to defeat the world champion Vishy Anand, but by then he knew he had done enough to win the tournament. The destiny of the first prize was decided when Vladimir Kramnik was unable to gain the victory he needed with black against Mickey Adams.

The tournament will also be remembered for Vladimir Kramnik's superb play, and a strong performance by Mickey Adams to cheer the home crowd.

Despite his final round draw, Kramnik placed second with a +4 score, achieving his highest rating in over a decade (2809.7 Elo).

Hikaru Nakamura finished win a win against Luke McShane to share third place with Adams, while Judit Polgar and Lev Aronian drew their game and finish in the bottom half of the standings.

The final standings in the 2012 London Chess Classic (3-1-0 scoring)

#

Name

Fed

Elo

Pts

1

Carlsen, Magnus

NOR

2848

18

2

Kramnik, Vladimir

RUS

2795

16

3

Adams, Michael

ENG

2710

13

3

Nakamura, Hikaru

USA

2760

13

5

Anand, Viswanathan

IND

2775

9

6

Aronian, Levon

ARM

2815

8

7

Polgar, Judit

HUN

2705

6

8

McShane, Luke

ENG

2713

5

9

Jones, Gawain C B

ENG

2644

3

.

Magnus Carlsen's tournament-end rating is a record 2861.4 Elo

.

.

Mickey Adams and Vladimir Kramnik drew their final round game

.

.

Hikaru Nakamura finished with a win against Luke McShane

.

.

Judit Polgar and Lev Aronian also drew their last game

.

.

Congratulations to Malcolm Pein and all those involved in the organisation of the 2012 London Chess Classic. How on earth can you top that next year?

The time control was 2 hours for 40 moves, then 1 hour for 20 moves, then 30 minutes to finish. The 'Bilbao' style 3-1-0 scoring system was used.

More information on all the London Chess Classic events is at the official website.

Commenti

I think there's something to be said for Carlsen. This was a magnificent tournament performance, one really for history books.

However, I hesitate to say that Carlsen is going to steamroll over all the other players from now on. He still drew with Kramnik and Anand. Aronian was nowhere near his good form. It's still too close to call when it comes to who's gonna be on the throne next year. For all we know, as seen from today's game, Anand may be able to keep his title, though just barely. It's even possible Kramnik could defeat Carlsen and regain the title. Aronian could come back even. Time will tell.

Carlsen, Anand, Nakamura, and Aronian will meet again in Tata Chess January 11-27. Other strong players like Caruana, Karjakin, Leko, Wang, and Giri will also join them. Should be a great event too, and hope there'll be a good live coverage as well. Really looking forward to it .

Well, it looks like Carlsen has been able to clearly get ahead of someone with whom Kasparov had problems in 2000 (Kramnik), which is all I need to see. Even if there is rating inflation, it's not like Kasparov's 2851 was obtained in the dark ages.

About rating gaps: While it's cool to see one person dominating chess, I don't agree that the gap is always the best determinant of greatness. If there were to emerge, for instance, a group of five 2900 performing players (assuming for the purposes of argument no rating inflation), then, well we just have five unfathomably strong players; I wouldn't care that there wouldn't be someone clearly ahead of everyone else -- the quality of play would be beautiful no matter how you looked at it.

It could be speculated that the reason why Carlsen's gap is smaller than Kasparov's is simply because his opposition is better than during Kasparov's time, not because Carlsen is not playing the best chess.

It was extremely disappointing to observe the poor performance of McShane especially on his last game against Nakamura where he also showed a lack of fighting spirit. Luke ended with 1 win 5 loses and 2 draws.

Even more disappointing was to witness the extremely poor performance of Aronian (#2 at the start of the tournament) who ended with 1 win, 2 loses and 5 draws.

It was an exciting tournament because Carlsen archived the highest ELO rating in chess history, but the last round was no exciting mainly because Kramnik played the Berlin Wall.

I don't recall denying that being +50 elo over the second strongest player is an amazing accomplishment. Yes, ceddy, it is especially impressive in a modern context to be so far above the rest of the field. Not sure what people are getting so worked up over. Comparing players from different eras is dubious at best, but to the extent it is possible within Elo, the relevant metric is margin over contemporaries. By that measure, Carlsen still has not attained the same level of dominance as Kasparov had (the point on Fischer I'd let slide because so much has changed since then, and it was such a unique occurrence anyways).

I was at the london chess classic on saturday infact actually, where Carlsen played Nakamura, it was quite funny as magnus came out of the elevator his bag got caught on the rail as he tried to jump over it. Then some people tried to get his autograph but he refused saying he was in a rush, (he arrived with 1 minute to spare).

a lot of crying as babies here because of carlsen's new record. anyway for those who say that magnus didnt brake any record because of the different between the #1 and the #2, well in that case kasparov didnt brake any record either so stop crying babies

@offtherook What you are saying isn't absolute either, because that will depend on how strong the #2, #3, etc players are. Kramnik and Aronian now are stronger players than Spassky and whoever was around #3 and #4 at the time. So, Fisher was on a completely different level than his peers. I doubt that Fisher at his prime would white wash and humiliate 6-0 any player in the top 10 currently. And one last argument, suppose that the two greatest players of all time coincide in age, they will be way ahead of everyone else rating wise, but they will be close to each other. So no, the difference between #1 and #2 is not absolute either.

Just enjoy the fact that chess has again someone exciting to watch after Kasparov retired and hope that it continues for as long as p;ossible.

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